A summer’s come and gone and we have the choice to open another school year in willful ignorance of Israel’s intentional policy of displacing Palestinians by seizing their land illegally. Despite posturing a freeze in settlement building and expansion, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have just recently authorized the continuation of this practice in a slap to the White House’s face. Odd practice when it is the U.S. who funds a significant portion of Israel’s budget. It seems that Israel will elect to press their luck by continuing criminal land grabs. The question is whether or not we will tolerate our tax dollars underwriting it any longer. It’s time to say we do not consent to being the financiers of the deliberate usurpation of a sovereign people’s land. If we continue, unquestioningly, to send foreign aid to support such actions, we will never extricate ourselves from the repercussions of those who no doubt regard us as complicit âÄî if not encouraging âÄî this historically consistent Israeli policy. Taqee Khaled University student